Associational Thinking

A recent post and article in Forbes, by Clayton Christensen and colleagues, presented results of research on innovative companies. Their focus was development of a method to rank and evaluate publicly traded companies with a measure called The Innovation Premium. But to me, the really important ideas that come from their new book, The Innovator's DNA, and the article, are the five skills of disruptive innovators quoted below.

• Questioning allows innovators to challenge the status quo and consider new possibilities;
• Observing helps innovators detect small details—in the activities of customers, suppliers and other companies—that suggest new ways of doing things
• Networking permits innovators to gain radically different perspectives from individuals with diverse backgrounds;
• Experimenting prompts innovators to relentlessly try out new experiences, take things apart and test new ideas;
• Associational thinking—drawing connections among questions, problems or ideas from unrelated fields—is triggered by questioning, observing, networking and experimenting and is the catalyst for creative ideas.

I guess that professionals in architecture and engineering firms might very well think this article is mainly a consideration for corporate businesses, but because we are trained as creative professionals, we think that innovation is really our normal game. However that may be an arguable point. The five skills of disruptive innovators, along with the "3P's" of people, processes and philosophies, frame their understanding of the DNA of innovative organizations and provide a structure for all to assess their real innovation potential. It is a good message to understand.

Further on in the article, they ask the question "what does the average company need to achieve in these areas to spark an innovation premium?" They then lay out an answer for architectural and engineering firms to consider.

Fundamental change within senior managers (some mastery of the five discovery skills); changes in how their innovation project teams work (processes that support innovation); and changes in philosophies that foster the belief that innovation really is everyone’s job. Rare is the leader who fully grasps how to embed the 3Ps deeply enough into a company’s culture to create a powerful, positive innovation premium.

The takeaway for me in this innovation story is the importance of associational thinking. Let's take this research from the business world and related industries, and transfer it to architectural and engineering practices as the design industry deepens the growth of innovation and new ideas for the built environment.

What Do You Bet? - Idea Generation and Innovation

I just read an interesting innovation article called Little Bets: Think Differently, written by Peter Sims and drawn from his new book, Little Bets. His article, published in Change This, starts with the provocative quote “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” He offers an interesting perspective on idea generation and innovation that challenges some conventional wisdom. For example, he contrasts the genius and experimental approaches while also exploring the attributes of fixed and growth mindsets.

There are many useful perspectives, drawn from varying sources like Chris Rock, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, for various ways to approach the creation of ideas, and the testing and realization of those ideas. Two topics stand out for me: prototyping and “plussing”. Sims is a very strong proponent of idea prototyping and shares the collaborative design process of “plussing” as used by Pixar. The idea behind “plussing” is to build upon and improve ideas of your team mates without using judgmental language. Two good concepts and quotable thoughts relate to the architectural engineering world:

“Ingenious ideas almost never spring into people’s minds full formed; they emerge through a rigorous experimental discovery process.”

“For most of us, successfully adopting an experimental approach requires significant change in mindset. After all, we’ve been taught to avoid mistakes and failures at all costs.”

But of all the topics, discussions and examples, the theme of little bets and related small wins, is the most powerful and useful. So as Peter Sims summarizes, "It all begins with one little bet, what will yours be?"

Own Your Time

Similar to my recent post, Life in Small Bites, a recent Fast Company blog by Graham Button, 7 Trends to Watch in an Age of Info Overload, looks at why the more information we have the less informed we feel. While he offers seven truths to keep things in perspective, two involved terms new to me - 'information sickness' or over exposure, and 'continuous partial attention' for multi-tasking. But what I find more important, particularly as it relates to our architectural and engineering professions, is the link between the daily information pressure and decisions we make about how to spend our time. Graham states that the real wealth is in owning our own time and being able to use it for creative social change. A quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt reinforces this time pressure vs. creativity link:

"Innovation is something that comes when you're not under the gun. So it's important that, even if you don't have balance in your life, you have some time for reflection… The creative parts of one's mind are not on a schedule."

True Grit

Seems that I'm reading, thinking and writing a lot about innovation, creativity, and team structures for successful outcomes. Maybe it's related to that Yogism, "the more you look, the more you see." At the core of my investigation is the search for evidence supporting those observations that lead to new structures and patterns of behavior which can effect successful change.

Many contemporary studies cite deliberate practice, design thinking, optimum frame of mind or mental preparation as determinants of success, but some current research points in a different, and old school direction. In a recent Boston Globe Ideas article, The Truth About Grit, Jonah Lehrer traces success from Newton's apple/gravity observations to current research on the linkage between a flash of insight and the effort to document a theory or produce a successful result. He notes that the celebration of the "aha moment" often overshadows the goals, discipline, effort and stick-to-itiveness that is actually required for success.

In recent years, psychologists have come up with a term to describe this mental trait: grit. Although the idea itself isn't new - "Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration," Thomas Edison famously remarked - the researchers are quick to point out that grit isn't simply about the willingness to work hard. Instead, it's about setting a specific long-term goal and doing whatever it takes until the goal has been reached. It's always much easier to give up, but people with grit can keep going.

Lehrer reports that two research psychologists, Angela Duckworth, who has pioneered the study of grit at University of Pennsylvania, and Carol Dweck at Stanford University, have been simultaneously investigating these personality traits, attempting to answer questions like exactly what is the 'grit' personality trait, how do you isolate and measure it, and can grit be learned?

One of the main obstacles for scientists trying to document the influence of personality traits on achievement was that the standard definition of traits - attributes such as conscientiousness and extroversion - was rather vague. Duckworth began wondering if more narrowly defined traits might prove to be more predictive. She began by focusing on aspects of conscientiousness that have to do with "long-term stamina," such as maintaining a consistent set of interests, and downplayed aspects of the trait related to short-term self-control, such as staying on a diet. In other words, a gritty person might occasionally eat too much chocolate cake, but they won't change careers every year. "Grit is very much about the big picture," Duckworth says. "It's about picking a specific goal off in the distant future and not swerving from it."

As described by both researchers, benefits from a better understanding of grit would be first to provide additional tools, beyond conventional intelligence and achievement testing, for use in a wide variety of applications to more accurately predict future success. Take the survey yourself at www.gritstudy.com to see how you measure up. The second benefit would be to provide a body of knowledge for educators to teach children the virtues of continuous effort. Dweck refers to this teaching effort as creating a "growth mindset" while Duckworth envisions educators teaching these skills to develop "a generation of grittier children." Key to these educational approaches is an emphasis on perseverance, combined with reinforcement of the basic hard work and degree of effort that leads to accomplishment.

An excellent example of a school that Duckworth and Dweck might envision is the Bronx KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) Academy. In Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Outliers, he tells the story of the school's co-founder, David Levin, the students at KIPP, and the unexpected characteristics of high student performance from this school in one of the poorer neighborhoods in New York City. Since its beginning in 1994, it has become one of the most desirable public schools in the City based on graduate achievement, and despite, or perhaps because of, its innovative schedule resulting in an extra two thirds time in the classroom over other district schools. KIPP students attend daily classes until 5 pm, spend four-hours in class every other Saturday, and don't complete their school year until three weeks into July. Gladwell quotes Levin on how students have adapted to the addition of the summer part of the program:

"The beginning is hard," he went on. "By the end of the day they're restless. Part of it is endurance, part of it is motivation. Part of it is incentives and rewards and fun stuff. Part of it is good old-fashioned discipline. You throw all of that into the stew. We talk a lot here about grit and self control. The kids know what those words mean."

No doubt, these are the forerunners of the generation of grittier, and more successful, children that Angela Duckworth envisioned.